Social media screening is a popular recruiting strategy that can be useful to vet candidates. However, being aware of potential legal issues and ethical concerns is important. For example, if a candidate makes misogynistic comments on social media, it can be challenging for an organization to spot this and avoid discrimination. Outsourcing social media screening can help employers avoid this.
Saves You Time
When HR teams conduct social media screening on their own, they waste hours looking at public data and profiles that ultimately aren’t relevant to a hiring decision. They can also get caught up in privacy laws and lack resources or training. Outsourcing to a third party saves time and money, eliminates non-compliance risk, and provides deeper insights into a candidate to help make better hiring decisions. Experienced background screening partners use automated programs to review a candidate’s digital footprint, flagging information that could indicate potential risks.
They can also provide you with the results of these searches in a legally compliant manner, redacting protected class information and ensuring that the content being reviewed belongs to the candidate, not someone else. Investing in premium tools for your marketing needs is essential to scale your business quickly. Still, only some brands have the budget or skillset to build an internal team. Partnering with a social media agency is a cost-effective option to ensure you can grow your audience quickly and efficiently.
Saves You From Mistakes
When a company tries to perform social media checks in-house, it can drain time and resources. Plus, avoiding bias when looking at a candidate’s private information online can be difficult. Employees may feel burdened, judged, untrusted, irritated, or censored by a hiring manager’s prying into their personal lives based on what they post online. Outsourcing to an experienced background screening provider can make the process more objective. A professional agency uses an automated screening program that’s FCRA, GDPR, and EEOC compliant and abides by all federal and state laws to ensure the social media screen is conducted unbiasedly.
It also filters out protected class information and redacts it so hiring managers can see only business-related content when reviewing a candidate’s profile. This makes the review more objective and prevents biased hiring decisions that could lead to a lawsuit. This is one of the main benefits of outsourcing to a third-party background check agency.
Saves You Money
Outsourcing can save you much money compared to hiring and training in-house. You pay an outside company to complete the work, so you don’t have to spend on advertising, recruiting, office space, equipment and payroll.
Adding social media screening to your recruiting strategy can weed out candidates with negative profile information. However, it’s important to remember that ad hoc reviews of candidates’ social media could put your organization in legal jeopardy, as implicit biases can undermine diversity and inclusion initiatives. Hiring an external agency to conduct a digital footprint check can eliminate this risk by providing unbiased and objective results consistent with federal regulations.
Automated social media screeners are FCRA, GDPR and EEOC compliant to ensure that no personal characteristics such as age, gender or religious beliefs are used in a biased manner. This prevents ad hoc searches from creating a patchwork of approaches across your organization and eliminates the potential for discrimination during the hiring process. Ultimately, this allows you to hire more diverse candidates who can bring valuable insight and perspective to your company.
Saves You From Legal Issues
Social media is firmly intertwined with our personal and professional lives. Still, it’s also too close for comfort when an employer—or even an HR department—begins following employees on social media. Encouraging a healthy distance between management and employees is wise, so leaving the social media screening process to an objective third party that understands employment laws is smart. Suppose an employer discovers information from a social media screening report that would lead them to take adverse action against a candidate.
In that case, they must follow the same process for determining if this is legal. This means they need to be able to clearly distinguish between protected classes, such as sex, race, religion, age and sexual orientation. Using an outside partner with an experienced team that complies with EEOC, FCRA, GDPR and state privacy laws makes it easier for employers to do this. This reduces the likelihood of a lawsuit and saves an employer time, money and resources.
In addition, outsourcing social media screening also helps to eliminate the need for a dedicated resource, saving an organization more money on salary, office space and equipment, and benefits like health insurance.
Saves You From Errors
Often, marketing teams have to juggle many roles. This is especially true for content marketing, which involves many skills such as email marketing, social media, copywriting, etc. Outsourcing can remove some of the workload so that your team can focus on the areas where they are most adept. It is also important to remember that if you review candidates’ social media profiles ad hoc basis, you could violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
Outsourcing your social media screening to a consumer reporting agency allows you to use the information legally while following FCRA guidelines. This will ensure that you are looking at the right person’s profile and not using protected class information such as race, sex, religion, or age as a reason for rejecting a candidate.
A quality third-party agency will only provide you with the information relevant to your hiring needs and redact any protected class information. This will help you avoid the risk of a lawsuit from a rejected candidate.